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JOURNEYS; In Berkeley, Strollers Find Art With Curb Appeal

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Published: January 17, 2003

Correction Appended

''WESTWARD the course of empire takes its way,'' wrote the 18th-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th-century founders of a little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western extremity of the American Empire, chose to name it after him.

Many famous men and women have walked its streets -- Ernest O. Lawrence, the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped develop the nation's best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savo, the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960's; and in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation's greatest restaurateur.

Another -- too little known, at least beyond northern California -- is the architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena. A Whitmanesque mystic who loved costumes and pageantry, he exhorted his colleagues: ''Let us stand on tiptoes, forgetting the nearer things and grasp what we may.''

Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of the University of California and in the hills above it, in the Northside neighborhood where Maybeck himself lived for most of his long and active life (1862-1957). More than anyone, he made Berkeley one of the nation's architectural treasure-troves.

Although few of the buildings are open to the public, the most important one is, and most of the others can be viewed from the street. On the hillsides, some houses stand on the cusp of the wilderness. Eucalyptus scents the air. Towering conifers frame sweeping views across to Alcatraz and, in some cases, all the way to the Golden Gate. Monkey puzzle trees and cypresses deformed by the wind provide sculptural punctuation to the compact houses, which are tucked deftly into their sites.

Maybeck's roots were in the Arts and Crafts movement. Along with a poet, publisher and aesthetic theorist named Charles Keeler, and others, he worked to turn the ''seismically unstable and intellectually volatile Berkeley hills,'' as the architecture writer Allen Freeman described them, into an Arcadian garden landscape, dotted with rustic wooden houses. They were guided by Keeler's injunction to ''let the work be simple and genuine, let it be a genuine expression of the life which it is to environ'' -- a sentiment worthy of an American William Morris.

In the strait-laced Victorian era, their counter-cultural way of life must have seemed almost as far out as the present-day pageant of nonconformity on Telegraph Avenue, between Bancroft Way and Dwight Way, where hippies, punks, Rastafarians, Trotskyites and anarchists mingle with students.

Another Arts and Crafts architect, A. C. Schweinfurth, designed Berkeley's most famous building in that style, the First Unitarian Church (2401 Bancroft Way, 1898), which is now used by the university's dance program. Maybeck and Keeler were members of that church. A small, brown-shingled building, it is a piece of the forest in the city, with deeply overhanging eaves supported by redwood tree trunks with the bark left on.

MANY of Maybeck's important early houses were destroyed in an awful fire that swept Berkeley on Sept. 17, 1923, but the Isaac Flagg House (Shattuck Avenue near Eunice Street, 1901), with superbly preserved redwood paneling, and the Schneider-Kroeber House (1325 Arch Street, 1907) bear charming witness to an era of artistic modesty; both are reworkings of Swiss chalets.

The Faculty Club on the campus (1902-3, later additions by others) has the same bosky, unpretentious feeling, but it looks ahead to the eclecticism that marked Maybeck's later buildings. A Mission-Mediterranean exterior hides a Nordic-Gothic great hall, with stained-glass windows, a high-peaked ceiling with exposed timbers and a formidable fireplace.

That eclecticism reached a climax in Maybeck's masterpiece, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (Dwight Way at Bowditch Street, 1910, open briefly to the public after services Wednesday evening and Sunday morning). It and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a gem of romantic neo-Classicism that rises near the Golden Gate Bridge, are the two Maybeck buildings known to everyone interested in architecture.

When I mentioned to my old friend James Stewart Polshek, the New York architect, that my wife, Betsey, and I had been to see the church, he told me, ''I can still remember the impact that that building had on me when I saw it as a student 50 years ago.''

Shoehorned onto a corner site, the building is an amalgam of styles but a copy of none. Combining a Byzantine form, a Mediterranean pergola covered with wisteria, industrial steel windows, cement-asbestos panels, and fluted concrete columns with capitals that vaguely recall those at Vezelay in France, ''only a wizard like Maybeck could have kept it from being visually chaotic,'' as Sally B. Woodbridge writes in the biography ''Bernard Maybeck: Visionary Architect'' (Abbeville Press, 1992).

Correction: January 18, 2003, Saturday An article in Escapes yesterday about the architect Bernard Maybeck and other famous residents of Berkeley, Calif., misspelled the surname of the leader of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960's. He was Mario Savio, not Savo.

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